He was homeless — but to get help, the rules said he had to prove it [LATimes.com]

After being discharged from detox, Rory Gallegos had nowhere to go. So he made the street his home.

A year later, he thought he had found a home when the Hillview Mental Health Center in Pacoima offered him an apartment with onsite mental health services.

But to qualify for a voucher to pay for the room, Gallegos first had to prove that he was chronically homeless. He couldn’t produce the necessary documents.

For another year, he languished in a bureaucratic holding pattern, living in a shelter to establish his homelessness, by definition, while Hillview kept his room on hold.

Gallegos was caught in a historic transition in housing policy as the federal government  wrestled with how to parcel out inadequate resources to the most needy. It’s a shift away from waiting lists toward what is essentially a homelessness grading system.

Nearly three-fourths of Los Angeles County’s 50,000 homeless people live on the streets — and there are far too few vacant units to house more than a fraction of them.

[For more of this story, written by Doug Smith, go to http://www.latimes.com/local/l...0731-snap-story.html]